Editor’s note:This recap of the “True Detective” Season 1 finale, which aired Sunday (March 9), contains spoilers. Read no further if you have not yet watched Episode 8.Join TV writer Dave Walker and me at 9 a.m. Monday (March 10) in the comment stream below to discuss this series.

The finale of HBO's “True Detective,” which aired Sunday (March 9), was unlike the seven episodes that came before it in that it told a linear story moving in chronological order from one event to another – straight as an arrow -- to a harrowing climax followed by an unexpectedly uplifting epilogue.

One could quibble that the pieces of the investigation fell into place a bit too neatly, but the finale beautifully delivered what has made the police drama so compelling, Nic Pizzolatto’s terrific dialogue between the two partners, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), that not only moves the action, but reveals who they are.

Here's a look at what went down on Sunday.

The killer… or one of the killers?

We finally get to see the world through the eyes of one of the bad guys. The finale opens with scarface, the lawnmower man, standing in a ramshackle shed talking to someone we cannot see.

“Them flies are getting thick,” he says. “Somebody ought to give you a good hosin’. Heat ain’t helpin’. Reckon you’ll keep another day. Be good. I’ll bring you some more water around noon. Bye, Daddy.”

He comes inside and, after pausing to watch Cary Grant and James Mason on television sparring in “North by Northwest,” he drops his hillbilly accent to adopt Mason’s refined tone. The Mason accent is even more jarring given that he and his wife/sister/lover share a filthy house strewn with rags, books, old dolls, children’s clothing…

“You want to make flowers today?” asks the woman, who appears to be mentally challenged. “You haven’t made flowers on me for maybe three weeks. Makes me sad is all.”

He pulls her on his lap and begins to caress her, and he asks her to tell him about grandpa: “I was in the cane fields and he caught me when I was alone…”

Next, we catch up with Cohle and Hart, who force Sheriff Steve Geraci to watch the video that Cohle showed Hart. As Geraci watches, the camera cuts away, and we hear him cry out, “Oh, Jesus Christ. Why are you showing me this?”

“That little girl is the one you said went to see her daddy, Marie Fontenot, circa 1990,” Cohle tells him.

The sheriff says he filed a missing juvenile report, but that the then-Sheriff Childress marked it “report made in error.”

“I just followed what the big man says. It’s how this all works,” Geraci said. “Nobody ever gave me a reason to second-guess it. It’s chain of command, right?”

Cohle and Hart threaten the sheriff that if anything happens to them, copies of the tape and all of the evidence they have gathered will be mailed to police and the press. (We later see one of those envelopes is addressed to The Times-Picayune.)

Back at the office, Hart starts thinking about the green-eared spaghetti monster that chased the little girl through the woods.

“Why green ears? Assuming that’s our guy?” Hart asks, and he pulls out old photos from the houses that the then-detectives canvassed in ’95. One of them is a bright green house. He compares it to a photo of the faded house today.

Hart and Cohle resolve the past

On the ride to the green house, we are treated to another classic Hart and Cohle exchange, as they drive along rural Louisiana roadways.

“Something’s been bugging me the last 10 years. Not every day, just now and then,” Hart says and then asks Cohle if he held back during their final big fight in 2002.

As they talk it out, Hart tells him: “Yeah, you know when she (Maggie) told me, she said not to blame you; that it wasn’t your choice. You were drunk, and she made it happen”.

“Everybody’s got a choice, Marty ... I sure blamed you,” Cohle says.

“Blamed me for what?” Hart asks.

“For pushing a good woman to the point where she had to use me, use our partnership to get rid of you.”

“You know she couldn’t have used you (if) you didn’t want her some,” Hart says.

“There you go. Everybody’s got a choice.”

The pair goes back and forth about the past, but finally Cohle tells him, “I never told you how to live your life, Marty.”

“No, no, no, you just sat in judgment,” Hart says.

Cohle mumbles something about people being “sentient meat,” adding, “However illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgments. Everybody judges, all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.”

Hart waits a beat and then asks: “What’s scented meat?”

The last piece of the puzzle

The pair finds the owner of the green house and learn that she did have it painted bright green in the early 1990s and that one of the men who painted it “had scars along the bottom of his face.”

By searching the woman’s husband’s tax records, Cohle and Hart discover that Childress and Son Maintenance did the job. They find an old address for Billy Childress and plan to head there, but, in the meantime, as insurance, Hart meets with Detective Thomas Papania, the younger detective who questioned both Cohle and Hart.

The detective is still dubious, but he agrees to take Hart’s call, if the two come across hard evidence.

And, good thing too, because when they drive up to the Childress house in the woods, Cohle takes one look and says: Call Papania.

When Hart can’t get a signal on his cellphone, he moves toward the house to use the phone inside and Cohle says, “Marty, this is the place.”

Hart is greeted at the door by lawnmower man’s woman, who says she doesn’t have a phone, but Hart breaks in and, eventually, finds the phone. Meanwhile, Cohle heads into the woods where he sees lawnmower man in the distance.

Hart heads out to back up Cohle, stopping in the shed where we first saw lawnmower man. Chained to the bed is a long-dead man with his mouth sewn shut.

Soon Hart and Cohle, guns drawn, are searching – separately -- for lawnmower man in an overgrown brick structure. Inside is debris, as well as children’s shoes, clothes, and large devil catchers.

Cohle finally comes to a large room that feels almost like a cathedral, with a circular opening in the roof that lets the sun in. An altar of sorts is decorated with skulls and antlers.

As Cohle looks around, he has one of his hallucinations when the wall disappears and he seems to be looking at outer space.

Suddenly, lawnmower man stabs him, and a gruesome, bloody fight begins until Cohle head butts the giant man and they fall away from each other. He comes back at Cohle, but, by then, Hart arrives and shoots him just he throws an ax and hits Hart with it. Hart and lawnmower man begin fighting, but just as lawnmower man is about go in for the kill, Cohle shoots and kills him.

We hear sirens and the two detectives, Gilbough and Papania, arrive just in time.

A resolution of sorts

At the hospital, the two detectives tell Hart that they’ve connected the lawnmower man to the Dora Lange and the Lake Charles cases. Maggie and Hart’s two daughters visit him.

And we hear a snippet of a newscast explaining: That lawnmower man was Errol William Childress and that he is responsible for dozens of missing people, but that state attorney general and the FBI have “discredited rumors” that the Childress was in some way related to Louisiana Senator Tuttle.

Hart goes to visit Cohle in his hospital room when Cohle finally wakes up from a coma. Cohle opens to up to Marty telling him that he saw Childress in 1995.

“I saw him Marty. He was on that schoolyard on Pelican Island in ‘95. I couldn’t tell how tall he was cause he was sitting and his face was dirty, but I saw him.”

“That’s what’s buggin you?”

“Tuttle. The men in the video. We didn’t get ’em all.”

“And we ain't gonna get ’em all. That ain’t what kind of world it is, but we got ours.”

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Cohle says.

Next, the camera takes us on a trip to the various key sites in the case, the Childress house, the Ledoux compound, Pelican Island and, finally, the huge oak tree in the sugarcane filed where Lange was found in Episode One.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship

Finally, Hart visits Cohle again at the hospital. The simple gesture of Hart, giving Cohle the gift of a pack of cigarettes sets off an exchange of dialogue that is well worth transcribing. Hart roll Cohle’s wheelchair away from the hospital, so Cohle can light up. As he smokes, Cohle says, “I shouldn’t (expletive) be here, Marty.”

Hart says no kidding…

“I don’t’ mean like that. It’s something else.”

“So, talk to me Rust.”

“There was a moment I know when I was under in the dark. Whatever I’d been reduced to, not even consciousness, a vague awareness in the dark. I could feel my definitions fading. And beneath that darkness there was another kind. It was deeper, warm, like a substance. I could feel, man. And I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me there. (Hart kneels at his side) So clear. I could feel her. I could feel … I could feel a piece of my pop, too. It was like I was part of everything that I ever loved. And we're all -- the three of us -- just fading out. And, all I had to do was let go. And I did. I said darkness, yeah, yeah, and I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there -- more than before. Nothing. Nothing, but that love,” and he breaks down weeping. “Then, I woke up. “

Hart reminds Cohle about how when Cohle was younger he used to make up stories about the stars. Cohle says that in Alaska there wasn’t much else to do other than walk around and explore and Hart finishes his old partner’s thoughts: “And, look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”

Cohle says that he’s been looking out the hospital window every night and thinking: “There’s just one story. The oldest.”

“What’s that?” Hart asks.

“Light versus dark,” Cohle says.

“Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory,” Hart says.

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Cohle says.

Cohle tells Hart to take him away from the hospital, getting up out his wheelchair.

“You know what, I’d protest, but it occurs to me that you are un-killable,” Hart says.

What is the real revelation of "True Detective"? It's not whether the partners caught all of the bad guys and brought them to justice. They didn't. It's that Cohle somehow pulls back from the extreme darkness that he was living in. And, Hart and Cohle (get it? heart and soul) are united forever by this experience.